LHB Erector Set

April 15, 2008

Columbo. I’ll tell ya, I got this cousin Ralph who says I look just like him, but he’s kinda cockeyed so it’s hard to trust his opinion. Now me, I think I’m more of a Rockford type. You know, it’s funny how people are different.

Oh, there’s just one more thing. I don’t have a glass eye. Let me ask you this: Was Columbo supposed to have a glass eye, or was Peter Falk’s glass eye playing the part of a real eye?

"For something to be cool it has to be not just edgy, it has to be enigmatic," Hajdu said. "It has to be a puzzle to the masses because it has to exclude the masses, if it doesn't it can't be cool. Membership in the club of cool has to be restricted by definition: the smaller the audience, the cooler comics can be."

“The big leap for me was getting the idea that short fiction could do long spans of time,” says Silber over coffee and doughnuts in the sunny living room of her Lower East Side apartment. Her spiritual mentor in this approach was Alice Munro. Linking the stories has gotten easier to manage with The Size of the World, but Silber doesn’t map it out in advance. “I didn’t know where I was going with it. You can’t do that with a novel. You’ll just paint yourself into a corner.”

Mashable reports that Buzznet has acquired several Gawker blogs, including the music site Idolator.

Fans shouldn't expect too much high-wattage crossover with Lollapalooza, which Attal's company C3 Presents also books. Radiohead, Rage Against the Machine, Nine Inch Nails and Kanye West are all slated to play the storied fest, which takes place Aug. 1-3 in Chicago's Grant Park.

"They're two totally different shows, and I'm pleased with how they separated themselves this year," Attal said, referring to the routing issues that often dictate festival stops for bands. "Lollapalooza was born out of more of an alternative rock show. We try to stay true to that and to the spirit of the ACL show at Zilker."

Not only one of the best novelists working today but also maybe the most fun, Chabon takes you on an adventure that has touches on everything from the 1980s comic book American Flagg to the romance of zeppelin travel. Throughout he can expound upon science fiction and Norse mythology, comic books and Philip Roth, the tug of nostalgia and the “stain of geekdom,” and he nearly always has something interesting to say about the topic.

Yes, I am one of the countless dorks who went to Morocco and made a point of bothering poor Paul Bowles at his apartment in Tangiers. This was in 1988. He was ill, coughing, and he stayed in bed, under the covers, while I sat in a nearby chair and peppered Mr. Bowles (the author of The Sheltering Sky, Let It Come Down, and some of the most chilling short stories in the English language) with absurdly collegiate questions about "the creative process." He was a gracious, old-world gentleman, but, yes, it dawned on me at some point that I was annoying him, and I decided to leave. He thought that was a good idea. In his courtly way he told me that if I wanted to learn something, I should travel deeper into Morocco instead of sitting in an apartment in Tangiers chatting with a bedridden old man. I took his advice.